Tuesday, August 22, 2006

South bank show & Hyperland on Guba.com

Two great items for Douglas Adams fans are now easily avalaible for free to download on guba.com. If you type Doulgas Adams, you will currently find two rare vids : Hyperland and the South bank show.
- Hyperland is "one-hour documentary produced by the BBC in 1990, Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest. A software agent, Tom (played by Tom Baker), guides Douglas around a multimedia information landscape, examining (then) cuttting-edge research by the SF Multimedia Lab and NASA Ames research center, and encountering hypermedia visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Looking back now, it's interesting to see how much he got right and how much he didn't: these days, no one's heard of the SF Multimedia Lab, and his super-high-tech portrayal of VR in 2005 could be outdone by a modern PC with a 3D card. However, these are just minor niggles when you consider how much more popular the technologies in question have become than anyone could have predicted - for while Douglas was creating Hyperland, a student at CERN in Switzerland was working on a little hypertext project he called the World Wide Web..." (source : douglasadams.com).
- The South bank show was aired in 1992 on ITV when "Mostly Harmless" was released. It features interviews with Douglas, Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins, John Lloyd, Geoffrey Perkins... There are also some intercut dramatic scenes whith characters from Douglas Adams' books (Simon Jones & David Dixon are here of course but there is also Michael Bywater who plays Dirk Gently)